Just as baseball uses the minor leagues and basketball uses the G-League to develop their young players, all professional club sides in Europe have reserve and youth teams which they use to develop players through their academy system. But while basketball instated a pre-draft age limit, there are no such restrictions in soccer that prevent teams from using their younger players. If a teenager is deemed good enough, he is often thrown into the first team to play against fully-grown men.

While transcendental talents like Ronaldo and Messi managed to maintain excellent form even with their early professional starts at the very highest level, it left a whole host of players burned out before they reached their primes. Think of someone like Alexandre Pato, who dazzled for A.C. Milan from 2007–2013 when he was between 18-24 years old. After that superb stint in Italy, Pato fell off the map and is now back home playing for Sao Paulo in Brazil.

In the NFL these days, a new trend has emerged with young quarterbacks. Following the success of Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes, many teams have started “redshirting” franchise quarterbacks during their rookie years. Rather than exposing a QB to the NFL straight out of college, teams nurture their signal-caller for a year so they can learn the system outside the spotlight and be more ready for the pros. A variant of that system has been around in soccer for a while — sending players out on loan to slightly lower-level clubs.

For much of the last decade, Chelsea has been criticized for its so-called “loan army.” The Blues have had notoriously good youth teams in the 2010s, winning seven of the last 10 FA Youth Cup’s in England, but their first-team managers over that time have also been infamously unwilling to grant younger players game time. Rather than warming the benches or playing for the reserve team, these players were loaned out to smaller clubs to get more accustomed to playing professional soccer without being constantly scrutinized if they were in the first team at Chelsea. (Every club does this, Chelsea just stood out for sheer numbers.)

Last winter, though, the club was hit with a 12-month transfer embargo. In the summer, Chelsea appointed former star — and academy graduate — Frank Lampard as its new boss. When the young players returned from their loaned clubs, Lampard granted fellow academy products like Mason Mount and Tammy Abraham the chance to start in the first team. Despite both being under 22, being out on loan had allowed the pair to play more than 150 professional league games between them prior to starting for Chelsea. They were able to handle the pressure of starting for the Blues and have been excellent thus far in the season.

While some generational talents (like Zion Williamson) might be ready and deserving of the attention at a very young age, the success of Mahomes and the Chelsea youngsters shows that maybe it’s time we gave these young athletes a little more time and space to develop before throwing them into the limelight.

This article was first published on The Tufts Daily on October 16, 2019.